Immersion comes from 'the world' appearing credible. It has to make real, practical sense. What would not make sense is if I have to run all the way around a mountain chain to get somewhere, while everyone else can just use a transporter. Eventually, that would either ruin immersion for me, or make me feel like some sort of second class citizen.

Immersion really is a feeling, a sense of reality. Or at least a different reality.

This will help in keeping with the lore, but will not restrict people from getting all, or most of the classes. Also the bonuses should be spread out such that no one race has a big advantage at learning all of the classes.

Why is there all this uproar about the art? in EQ1 there were many different races and areas, and each had their own 'art'. All we have seen is one of those. There is likely to be at least a dozen more, different settings in the release that include very different art.

Inflation occurs when either the quantity of liquid cash on hand increases, or the value of other goods increases. If you provide less goods (decrease supply) the cash value of these will increase. Also, if you hold the amount of useful items steady and the amount of cash increases, the cost of the items will increase with the amount of cash on hand. This all assumes demand remains steady (same number of players). If demand increases, so will cost and inflation as money, by itself, is useless.

Yes, I have a Masters in economics.

The best way to look at it is as if money were a tradable item. I know, novel idea! Anyway, we all trade away what we do not want for what we do want. Money by itself is only useful in that it may yield us good things in the future and we can never truly predict the future. The more money there is, the more of it you will need to trade for other things. The more goods there are, the less they will cost, as people will be more worried about the future, and not their ability to acquire things right now.

The way to keep inflation low or zero is to only print money (or gold coins) when there are more tradable things (goods, equipment, breast plates, ect...) produced.

Just in case anyone is interested I did some math (combinations, factorials, ect...) and found that if each class gets 4 slots, and there are 4 categories of abilities for each slot (ie. off, def, utl, mov), there are 35 distinct combinations that can be created.

However, if you add another category, say healing or a different subset of utility, you now can make 70 different class combinations.

There is plenty of room here to make up to 70 different classes, each with a different slot configuration. And if each class came with its own abilities, you could pick and choose which ones you wanted to put in each slots.

Ok, here is the crap. Far to many people need soloing for atleast part of their gameplay time. Many of us have jobs, kids, houses, ect.. I can play probably 5 days a week. However, I can only afford one day a week for a long session. The rest will be between one and two hours.

I am so glad that you brought this up. Back in the day, we used to play some amazingly epic D&D battles fighting orcs and goblins. Not dragons or gods. If your opponent is numerous AND intelligent, these battles can be more fun than any Tank-N-Spank Dragon/God battle from any MMO I can think of.

I am hoping that combat will be much more dynamic. By doing this, many classes will have many roles. The game will be so much more interesting.

EDIT: I was thinking Lyam, that in D&D and old EQ, many of the mechanics were designed to attempt to simulate either realism or fantasy. Few of the mechanics were designed around player convenience. This is very much the heart of what this debate is about at his point, I think.